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I'm impressed with how Jason handled it. GS made some changes that sounded good enough to me, but after reading this post, I'm firmly on 37signals side. GetSa

I'm impressed with how Jason handled it. GS made some changes that sounded good enough to me, but after reading this post, I'm firmly on 37signals side. GetSatisfaction is a good idea but it's presented very deceptively and has the potential to hurt customers as much as it helps.

mdasen 18y ago
The problem is that morality comes into competition with money in this situation. The more legitimate and official and connected to the company Get Satisfaction makes their pages look, the more customers are going to use them as a way to try to get official-ish support. The more users use them as a way to get support, the more pressure there is on the company to use it as a support mechanism - whether they want to or not. Even beyond that, Get Satisfaction is essentially operating an unofficial forum that a company can pay to co-opt. Their paid plans specifically say that you get to shape the conversation. How Orwellian! So, you'll let users post bad things about my company on your service unless I start paying you in which case I get to decide what gets posted? That's just gross on both sides. And, of course, the more official it looks, the more it matters when people are posting bad things. Plus, once a company starts endorsing it, more customers will use it meaning that they can never stop paying. There's a huge moral hazard there. If their business plan were to offer an unofficial support system for all companies, that would be great. If their business plan were to offer a product companies could sign up for to outsource their support IT infrastructure, that would be great. But their business plan is to offer the first in the hopes that companies will feel pressure to do the second. EDIT: I want to clarify that I don't think Get Satisfaction is maliciously plotting in this way. I'm guessing that their plotting is to give customers the best support channels possible - in cases that they can be official, that means being official, but in other cases, it means giving customers the chance to unofficially talk about the company/products. However, it also means that their profits become tied to whether companies feel pressure to make Get Satisfaction an official support mechanism and the more people that use it because it looks official-ish, the more their profits are likely to be.
- batasrki 18y ago
  As I said in a comment just posted, the user who wanted satisfaction, no pun intended, created that page on GetSatisfaction forums. If anything, the failure was technical, since GS did not notify 37Signals that a page has been created for their company. Matter of fact, same can be said for any third-party service that lets users create pages/forums for companies they have beef with.
  - mdasen 18y ago
    See, but most third-party services aren't also trying to sell themselves as a legitimate, official thing too. Sure, I can post links to Amazon releases here, but HN isn't trying to offer itself to Amazon as "pay $X and you'll have your press releases up here" at the same time. The difference is that anyone can post things on here and there's nothing any company can do about it. I could post, "Amazon's new MapReduce is a plot to steal my data" and people could vote it up. Likewise, I could post that on GS, but it's different: GS then has this option for Amazon to stop comments/posts they don't like (for a fee). That's the difference. Most third party sites have this: "we'll let users post bad things about you". GS has this: "we'll let people post bad things about you. . .unless you pay us." That's morally hazardous.
    - batasrki 18y ago
      Yes, but had they not had their pages looking semi-official, there would be no reason to use GS, now would there? As I've said somewhere lower in the comments, two things would have made a world of difference here. 1. GS should have had an e-mail notification system in place. They should notify any company, much less 37Signals, that there's been a question posted on their forums. Same can be said for UserVoice and any other third-party site who wants to get into this game. Had they notified the support people at 37Signals, none of this would have come to bear. 2. Jason, no matter how angry he is/was, should have NOT used a public forum for dealing with this issue immediately. Had he talked to GS's admins/support through e-mail privately, there'd be no need for this hubbub. If the e-mail route did not work, then I agree with denouncing GS publicly. All I'm alluding to here is maturity. There are good ways of handling issues and then there are bad ones. Even if Jason has a good point about GS's business conduct, it's lost, not just on me, based solely on his approach to it.
saturdayplace 18y ago
I wondered why Jason didn't just contact GS directly with his concerns. Even if his customers might be confused by GS, Jason knows who/what they are and could of raised his grievances with them directly. Instead he published some serious accusations on his widely-read blog knowing it'd get a lot of buzz. I imagine this whole story could've played out a little better if instead of jumping the gun and shouting 'malice' he'd've taken some extra time to work things out directly with GS.
- rimantas 18y ago
  Because acting this way assures that the problem will be noticed and acted upon. Private letter would achieve nothing at worst and maybe some tweaks to 37signals page on GS at best. Customers of the other companies would get the same confusing message making it easy to take GS pages as official support. As you can see I don't believe in GetSatissfaction "mistakes". All the design decisions (which eventually led to the trouble with 37s) they took look very logical.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Also, because maybe Fried doesn't give a shit about whether GS gets their act together (as long as they fix the page), but does care that the 100 other startups that have the bright idea of grabbing 37signals logos have some idea that they're going to get smacked down for doing that.
    - gry 18y ago
      I wonder how the discussion would've been had Jason used GS' site itself to note concerns. It'd be a sanctioned and public forum. Would people be discussing public vs private airing of grievances? Probably not.
      - Semiapies 18y ago
        One of Fried's original points was that they didn't want to run a duplicate support site just because another company wanted to make money off of them.

mdasen 18y ago

The problem is that morality comes into competition with money in this situation. The more legitimate and official and connected to the company Get Satisfaction makes their pages look, the more customers are going to use them as a way to try to get official-ish support. The more users use them as a way to get support, the more pressure there is on the company to use it as a support mechanism - whether they want to or not. Even beyond that, Get Satisfaction is essentially operating an unofficial forum that a company can pay to co-opt. Their paid plans specifically say that you get to shape the conversation. How Orwellian! So, you'll let users post bad things about my company on your service unless I start paying you in which case I get to decide what gets posted? That's just gross on both sides. And, of course, the more official it looks, the more it matters when people are posting bad things. Plus, once a company starts endorsing it, more customers will use it meaning that they can never stop paying. There's a huge moral hazard there. If their business plan were to offer an unofficial support system for all companies, that would be great. If their business plan were to offer a product companies could sign up for to outsource their support IT infrastructure, that would be great. But their business plan is to offer the first in the hopes that companies will feel pressure to do the second. EDIT: I want to clarify that I don't think Get Satisfaction is maliciously plotting in this way. I'm guessing that their plotting is to give customers the best support channels possible - in cases that they can be official, that means being official, but in other cases, it means giving customers the chance to unofficially talk about the company/products. However, it also means that their profits become tied to whether companies feel pressure to make Get Satisfaction an official support mechanism and the more people that use it because it looks official-ish, the more their profits are likely to be.

batasrki 18y ago
As I said in a comment just posted, the user who wanted satisfaction, no pun intended, created that page on GetSatisfaction forums. If anything, the failure was technical, since GS did not notify 37Signals that a page has been created for their company. Matter of fact, same can be said for any third-party service that lets users create pages/forums for companies they have beef with.
- mdasen 18y ago
  See, but most third-party services aren't also trying to sell themselves as a legitimate, official thing too. Sure, I can post links to Amazon releases here, but HN isn't trying to offer itself to Amazon as "pay $X and you'll have your press releases up here" at the same time. The difference is that anyone can post things on here and there's nothing any company can do about it. I could post, "Amazon's new MapReduce is a plot to steal my data" and people could vote it up. Likewise, I could post that on GS, but it's different: GS then has this option for Amazon to stop comments/posts they don't like (for a fee). That's the difference. Most third party sites have this: "we'll let users post bad things about you". GS has this: "we'll let people post bad things about you. . .unless you pay us." That's morally hazardous.
  - batasrki 18y ago
    Yes, but had they not had their pages looking semi-official, there would be no reason to use GS, now would there? As I've said somewhere lower in the comments, two things would have made a world of difference here. 1. GS should have had an e-mail notification system in place. They should notify any company, much less 37Signals, that there's been a question posted on their forums. Same can be said for UserVoice and any other third-party site who wants to get into this game. Had they notified the support people at 37Signals, none of this would have come to bear. 2. Jason, no matter how angry he is/was, should have NOT used a public forum for dealing with this issue immediately. Had he talked to GS's admins/support through e-mail privately, there'd be no need for this hubbub. If the e-mail route did not work, then I agree with denouncing GS publicly. All I'm alluding to here is maturity. There are good ways of handling issues and then there are bad ones. Even if Jason has a good point about GS's business conduct, it's lost, not just on me, based solely on his approach to it.

saturdayplace 18y ago

I wondered why Jason didn't just contact GS directly with his concerns. Even if his customers might be confused by GS, Jason knows who/what they are and could of raised his grievances with them directly. Instead he published some serious accusations on his widely-read blog knowing it'd get a lot of buzz. I imagine this whole story could've played out a little better if instead of jumping the gun and shouting 'malice' he'd've taken some extra time to work things out directly with GS.

rimantas 18y ago
Because acting this way assures that the problem will be noticed and acted upon. Private letter would achieve nothing at worst and maybe some tweaks to 37signals page on GS at best. Customers of the other companies would get the same confusing message making it easy to take GS pages as official support. As you can see I don't believe in GetSatissfaction "mistakes". All the design decisions (which eventually led to the trouble with 37s) they took look very logical.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Also, because maybe Fried doesn't give a shit about whether GS gets their act together (as long as they fix the page), but does care that the 100 other startups that have the bright idea of grabbing 37signals logos have some idea that they're going to get smacked down for doing that.
  - gry 18y ago
    I wonder how the discussion would've been had Jason used GS' site itself to note concerns. It'd be a sanctioned and public forum. Would people be discussing public vs private airing of grievances? Probably not.
    - Semiapies 18y ago
      One of Fried's original points was that they didn't want to run a duplicate support site just because another company wanted to make money off of them.